Mayor Bill de Blasio, in a sharp shift from his initial objections, is poised to hire nearly 1,300 additional officers for the New York Police Department, a surprising addition in a $78.5 billion budget deal announced by city leaders on Monday night. The mayor, who has pledged to improve police-community relations, has long been hesitant to hire more officers, saying he felt comfortable with the city’s near-record-low level of crime. But his administration has come under intense pressure in recent weeks after a notable increase in homicides and shootings compared with the same period last year.

Chicago police officers initiated stop, question and frisk encounters at a much higher rate last summer than their New York City counterparts ever did, and just like with New York’s heavily criticized program, Chicago blacks and other racial minorities were disproportionately targeted, according to a civil liberties group. The American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois released a report Monday saying it identified more than 250,000 Chicago stop-and-frisk encounters in which there were no arrests from May through August 2014. African-Americans accounted for nearly three-quarters of those stopped, even though they make up about a third of the city’s population. On...

Two video bloggers got press for posting a video which they claimed shows the NYPD’s Islamophobia. In the video, two men wearing western clothes argue and push each other, and an officer does nothing. When dressed in Muslim garb, but acting the same way, they got a different reaction. The video was tweeted by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, and Huffington Post called it a “small glimpse into the ugly world of racial profiling.” …

NEW YORK, Oct. 19 (UPI) -- A new study suggests the New York City Police Department's stop and frisk practice may be leading to elevated levels of anxiety among young men in the city, especially young black men. The policy allows police to stop pedestrians and search them for drugs or weapons.

In a case that brought shock-waves to the judicial establishment, an Arizona appeals court ruled that an officer could stop and disarm someone merely because they were armed. Now the Arizona Supreme Court has reversed that ruling in a unanimous decision. From azcapitoltimes.com: Police cannot frisk someone they stop and question absent some “reasonable suspicion that criminal activity is afoot,” the Arizona Supreme Court ruled Thursday. While this ruling applies only to Arizona,it was the United States Constitution and the fourth amendment that was cited, not the Arizona Constitution. In a related event in Wisconsin, an open carry...

The New York Police Department said Tuesday it has disbanded a special unit whose efforts to try to detect terror threats in Muslim communities through secret surveillance sparked outrage. The surveillance program by the NYPD Intelligence Division had come under fire by community activists who accused the department of abusing civil rights. The program relied on plainclothes officers to eavesdrop on people in bookstores, restaurants and mosques. The tactic was detailed in a series of stories by The Associated Press and became the subject of two federal lawsuits. In a series of articles that began in August 2011, the AP...

As his first month as police commissioner under Mayor de Blasio winds down, Bill Bratton is already facing some sobering news — a 33 percent spike in murders across the city. According to the latest statistics released Tuesday, there have been 28 homicides so far this year compared to 21 in the same ­period last year. That puts the city on course for at least one murder a day.

Year-end boasts by Mayor Michael Bloomberg that New York is the safest big city in America can ring hollow in Brownsville, a Brooklyn neighborhood where the cycle of violence, silence and retribution feels entrenched and where crime seems immune to strategies that have brought record lows across the city. A burst of gunfire on neighborhood streets this past summer typified the frustrating cycle. A baby boy was struck in the head by a stray bullet and killed as he sat in his stroller. His father, who police believe was the intended target, refused to help police identify the gunman. […]...

remember when I was growing up, New York was a rough-and-tumble place where attitudes of racial animosity ran parallel to the perceptions of black-on-white crime. And despite a robust, national civil rights movement, there were feelings that blacks were almost exclusively responsible for gangs, prostitution and heroin addiction. Back in the ’60s and ’70s, believe it or not, as a young black man I too had concerns about crime being perpetrated upon me. I recall how to cross Central Park, my buddies and I would sprint top speed from Central Park West to the Fifth Avenue on the East Side...

If there ever existed a city, where the practice of the day was to line up ten mothers, alongside one of their children, and to purposely kill more than four of those children, you might imagine an incoming mayoral candidate would have an opinion about that. If that was a practice that happened once a year it would be horrifying. If it happened monthly or weekly there would be such an outcry from all civilized people that the cries for action would ring to the highest places of power within that city. If it happened every day people would begin...

She’s out! A federal appeals court on Thursday blocked Manhattan federal Judge Shira Scheindlin’s controversial ruling requiring restrictions on the use of stop-and-frisk by cops but didn’t stop there — the three-judge panel also took the extraordinary step of booting her from the case altogether. In a scathing rebuke, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals found that Scheindlin exhibited bias in the case that ran “afoul” of the code of conduct for US judges.

No New Murders Reported in the Five Boroughs Since October 6th In 2012, New York City saw the lowest number of murders and the lowest number of shootings at any time since comparable records were kept, with 419 murders and 1,374 shootings. Below is a year-to-date update on murders and shootings in 2013. This update is provided every week by the Mayor’s Office. Murders Through Sunday, October 13th, New York City has seen 90 fewer murders than at this point last year: 256 murders in 2013 compared to 346 murders in 2012 – a decrease of 26.0 percent. Murders committed...

The carnage began in the Glenwood Houses in Brooklyn, where 26-year-old Lamar Antonio Blackwood was shot repeatedly Friday evening. Later that night, another man was murdered in the Bronx and two were killed in Queens. Four men were shot to death and at least five people were wounded in an eruption of violence across the five boroughs overnight, cops said Saturday. The mayhem left a young man lifeless in Brooklyn, a teenage boy murdered in the Bronx and two men killed in Queens, police said. The carnage began in the lobby of an apartment building in the Glenwood Houses in...

A French court on Wednesday rejected claims that police identity checks on 13 people from minority groups were racist, saying officers didn’t overstep any legal boundaries. … The French ruling comes amid a public furor over stop and frisk policies of the New York Police Department. But in that case, being closely watched here, a judge has ruled against NYPD practices said to discriminate against blacks and Hispanics. Anti-racism groups say that non-white French—particularly blacks or those of Arab origin—face routine discrimination that diminishes their chances of finding jobs, getting into nightclubs and carving out a place for themselves in...

Mayoral front-runner Bill de Blasio offered no real solution Thursday when confronted with statistics revealing an alarming rise in gun violence that followed a federal judge’s ruling against the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk program. The Democratic nominee opposes the practice, but when asked point blank how he intends to keep the city safe, he would speak only in generalities. “We must restore the relationship between the police and community,” he said without explaining how that could be accomplished.... De Blasio’s November opponent, Republican Joe Lhota, took a much stronger stance. He said Scheindlin’s ruling — along with two anti-stop-and-frisk laws enacted over...

The recent ruling against stop-and-frisk has emboldened the city’s pistol-packing perps. In the month after federal judge Shira Scheindlin’s decision that the police procedure is unconstitutional, shootings spiked nearly 13 percent — and gun seizures plummeted more than 17 percent, The Post has learned. During the 28 days ending Sept. 8, there were 140 shootings across the Big Apple, compared with 124 during the same period last year, the figures show. And the number of gunshot victims was up more than 9 percent, with 164 people struck by bullets this year, compared with 150 shot over that month last year.

"What is to be done?" James Varney asked in his recent opinion piece, referencing the unfathomable increase in New Orleans violence. The answer, Varney suggested, may lie in more aggressive policing, more specifically, the stop-and-frisk tactic. Not striking New York's stop-and-frisk policy completely, a federal judge ruled that the nation's largest police department employed the tactic illegally, systematically singling out large numbers of blacks and Hispanics. So the judge appointed an independent monitor to oversee major changes, including body cameras on some officers, according to the Associated Press.

The recent federal court rebuke of New York City’s stop-and-frisk tactics shows that many disputes are best resolved through politics, not lawsuits. Courts resolve discrete controversies — whether existing law has been violated. They’re not equipped to answer questions about what the law “should” be. Judicial remedies are supposed to make plaintiffs whole, not rewrite policies wholesale. But try telling that to Judge Shira Scheindlin. She not only enjoined NYPD’s existing tactics, but also ordered the city to video all stops within certain precincts and appointed a monitor to “develop . . . a set of reforms of the NYPD’s...

<p>NEW YORK (AP) — Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly assailed a federal judge's finding of racial discrimination and demand for changes to his department's stop and frisk practice, telling a Sunday news show that minority communities will be "the losers" if the ruling isn't overturned.</p>

August 15, 2013 Yesterday, in reference to a federal court ruling that found New York City's hyper-aggressive "stop-and-frisk" policy--ostensibly to combat "gun violence"--both blatantly unconstitutional and blatantly racist, this column noted what might be the most unforgivable aspect of Mayor Bloomberg's and the NYPD's jihad: Perhaps most egregiously, one defense of the policy is that the objective is not really to catch criminals in the act (of carrying contraband--specifically guns). The idea behind stopping hundreds of thousands of blacks and Hispanics per year--the vast majority of them innocent--is to instill fear in every member of these ethnic groups--fear that they...

Fifty years from now, when college students read about the history of America’s criminal-justice system, August 12, 2013 may turn out to be one of those watershed moments: a day when America took a hard look at the human costs of its criminal-justice policies — and began to reverse course. This morning, Judge Shira A. Scheindlin delivered her decision in Floyd, et. al. vs. the City of New York, in which she blasted the NYPD’s practice of stopping-and-frisking people and ordered the appointment of an independent monitor. Meanwhile, in California, Attorney General Eric Holder announced this afternoon that the Justice...

A federal court handed a big defeat to Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the New York Police Department today, ruling that the controversial â€śstop and friskâ€ť program infringed on constitutional rights. Judge Shira Scheindlin appointed a federal monitor to oversee the NYPD and â€śreformâ€ť the practice, although that might prove impossible: A federal judge appointed an independent monitor Monday to oversee changes to the New York Police Departmentâ€™s contentious policy known as stop, question and frisk, a significant judicial rebuke for what the mayor and police commissioner have defended as a life-saving, crime-fighting tool. â€¦Four men had sued saying they were...

On the defense after the City Council passed a pair of bills designed to curb the NYPD’s controversial stop-and-frisk tactic and other alleged abuses, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said today that his critics had it backwards when they accuse the police of stopping too many black and Latino men. In fact, he bluntly declared the opposite to be true if viewed through a lens of who commits murders. “I think we disproportionately stop whites too much and minorities too little,” Mr. Bloomberg argued during his Friday morning WOR radio show with John Gambling. “It’s exactly the reverse of what they say....

It comes as no surprise that controversy would ride the coattails of the news yesterday that Attorney General Eric Holder may suggest a federal monitor over the NYPD should stop-and-frisk be deemed unconstitutional in Floyd v. New York. Bloomberg and NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly freaked out in a teleconference with Holder the other day when they heard about the Justice Department's proposal. And yesterday, at an unrelated press conference, the m ayor made his opposition to the proposal absolutely, 100 percent clear. Contrary to an inspector general--a City Council proposal in the Community Safety Act currently making its way through...

Attorney General Eric Holder's office has filed a brief seeking a federal NYPD monitor in the event the court finds the stop-and-frisk policy unconstitutional. IN A STUNNING MOVE sure to send daggers through 1 Police Plaza and City Hall, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder weighed in at the last minute on the federal stop-and-frisk trial, tossing his support behind a federal monitor for the NYPD. Disputing outright the objections of Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly and City Hall, Holder’s office filed an eleventh-hour brief that could lead to a monitor if the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk policy is deemed unconstitutional. The last day...

New York Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly is in hot water after attempting to defend the city’s stop-and-frisk policy by claiming that African-Americans are actually “understopped.” In an interview with ABC’s Nightline, Kelly defended the NYPD’s use of the tactic, rejecting the notion that stop-and-frisk is directed disproportionately at New York’s African-American and Latino population. “The stark reality is that crime happens in communities of color,” Kelly told “Nightline” co-anchor Bill Weir on Wednesday. “About 70 percent to 75 percent of the people described as committing violent crimes -- assault, robbery, shootings, grand larceny -- are described as being African-American. “...

A fiendishly deceptive article about the New York Police Department in the New York Times has set back the cause of public safety not just in New York but nationally. A front-page story on Friday twisted a police commander’s exhortation to an underperforming officer to work harder against crime into an injunction to target blacks on the basis of race. The commander’s statements were captured on a tape secretly recorded by the officer and replayed last Thursday during a federal racial-profiling trial directed against the New York Police Department’s stop, question, and frisk policy. The officer had already joined the...

Telly Hudgins has been stopped and frisked by the police too many times to count in the Brownsville, New York, public housing project where he lives. One occasion sticks in his memory. "I had my pajamas on and my slippers on and I'm emptying my garbage" at the trash chute. "They asked me for ID to prove I lived there. Who walks around in their pajamas with ID?" asked the black, 35-year-old counselor for the mentally handicapped. He says he complained about the search and was issued a summons for disorderly conduct. Deborah Richardson, 60, a black postal worker, has...

As a New Yorker, I am heartbroken by the death of Police Officer Peter Figoski, and as a black woman, I am outraged by the hypocrisy of elected officials like City Councilman Jumaane Williams, Assemblyman Hakeem Jeffries and others who consistently critique the NYPD and oppose its stop-and-frisk policies. Have Williams, Jeffries and everyone else expressed their grief in the wake of the Figoski killing? Yes. But that doesn’t change the fact that these politicians and their allies never miss a chance to attack cops for their supposedly discriminatory targeting of black youth. Meanwhile, every day I read the paper...

How Profiling Saved My LifeBy Nicholas StixToogood Reports | December 16, 2003 Gettin’ PaidIt was just after 9 p.m. on a school night, and Dennis, Steve, Michael, maybe another guy and myself were on the corner, by the parking garage of a fancy apartment building a block away from our slummy neighborhood. Dennis, the ringleader was 14, Steve was 15, I was 13 and Michael was 12.Along comes an unmarked car, and Det. Kevan and some other plainclothes guys jump out, and hassle us. Stupid Det. Kevan, the jerk. Father of Jimmy, the bully, who was my age, and Jimmy’s...